Carl Sagan quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Carl Sagan on Wise Famous Quotes.

Our ancestors worshipped the Sun, and they were not that foolish. It makes sense to revere the Sun and the stars, for we are their children.

The lack is not in intelligence, which is in plentiful supply; rather, the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking.

Science exacts a substantial entry fee in effort and tedium in exchange for its insights.

Their position seems to be that their God is so great he doesn't even have to exist.

Science is merely an extremely powerful method of winnowing what's true from what feels good.

What an astonishing thing a book is.

Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter.

We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy.

Nobody listens to mathematicians.

Some racists still reject the plain testimony written in the DNA that all the races are not only human but nearly indistinguishable ...

Man is the matter of the cosmos, contemplating itself.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Human beings grew up in forests; we have a natural affinity for them. How lovely a tree is, straining toward the sky.

You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry.

We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.

God pity a one-dream man.

The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.

A still more glorious dawn awaits / not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise / a morning filled with 400 billion suns / the rising of the milky way

The progress and perfection of mathematics are linked closely with the prosperity of the state.

The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths / of exquisite interrelationships / of the awesome machinery of nature

War is murder writ large.

Absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error ...

If we say that God has always been, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always been?

Understanding is a kind of ecstasy

We can't help it. Life looks for life.

We are all made up of star stuff.

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you.

UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and in the interesting cases are unreliable.

Sagan is an astronomer with one eye on the stars, another on history, and a third - his mind's - on the human condition. ...

Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.

I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.

When permitted to listen to alternative opinions and engage in substantive debate, people have been known to change their minds. It can happen.

We are all star stuff.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

The price we pay for the anticipation of our future is anxiety about it.

I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.

All her life, dreams had been her friends. Her dreams were unusually detailed, well-structured, colorful.

Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.

I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

And because what we are doing is so horrifying, we tend not to think of it much.

The lure of the marvelous blunts our critical faculties.

Our ancestors lived out of doors. They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television programs.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom. LATIN PROVERB

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before,

In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work.

Intellectual capacity is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

How lucky we are to live in this time / the first moment in human history / when we are in fact visiting other worlds

We are made of starstuff. Some

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each other - Anaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time.

We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands.

The passion to explore is at the heart of being human.

We are made of starstuff.

It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put human face on random cosmic violence.

Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence to make them believable.

Who is really in charge of this planet?

A book is proof humans can do magic.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

Humans are very good at dreaming, although you'd never know it from your television.

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.

The secrets of evolution, are time and death.
There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

We are all stardust

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

All inquiries carry with them some element of risk.

The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Valid criticism does you a favor.

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth.

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.

Our very existence in that distant time requires that we will have changed our institutions and ourselves.

If people knew how many people, especially the very rich and powerful ones, went to psychics, their jaws would drop through the floor,

Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone.

We were wanderers from the beginning.

Science is a way to not fool ourselves.

When too much cynicism threatens to engulf us, it is buoying to remember how pervasive goodness is

What thin partitions sense from thought divide!

And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.

Some thrive for time, while most quickly vanish.

Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted.

Maxwell's Equations have had a greater impact on human history than any ten presidents.

One of the great commandments of science is, Mistrust arguments from authority.

If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?

The Sphinx is missing a nose. Someone shot it off in a moment of idle desecration - some say it was Mameluke Turks, others, Napoleonic soldiers.

Otto Warburg had, half a century before, proposed that oxidation was the cause of many cancers.

Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it.
Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse

Do dogs feel for humans something akin to religious ecstasy? What other strong or subtle emotions are felt by animals that do not communicate with us?

We have entered, almost without noticing, an age of exploration and discovery unparalleled since the Renaissance.

But I could be wrong.

The Cosmos is rich beyond measure - in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe.

You mustn't think of the Universe as a wilderness. It hasn't been that for billions of years," he said. "Think of it more as ... cultivated.

Any civilization that doesn't develop space travel dies.

There are some hundred billion (1011) galaxies, each with, on the average, a hundred billion stars.

Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office.

Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.